Posts Tagged ‘Change’

There have been many moments in my life where I have just thought, what on earth am I doing? Whether it was a job or being associated with a circle of friends. These are the moments you need to just sit down and think, what am I going to do to get past this? How am I going to progress and learn as a person?

The truth is, the only way is to do… From experience if you find yourself unhappy in a situation, get out of it as soon as possible. Don’t just sit there and feel sorry for yourself because ultimately it is you, who has gotten yourself into this situation… Think about the long term effects instead of the short term. If it is a job that you hate, use it as motivation to get a new one, one that you feel comfortable in and find enjoyment out of! If you have the necessary skills, start a business and be your own boss!

If you look around and think there is nothing out there for me to do… You are just limiting yourself. Why would you want to fit into a predetermined role in society anyway, why be someone that you know you aren’t for the benefit of those around you? It is just going to become a vicious cycle of unhappiness and ignorance.

Instead, think of ways in which you can use your strengths, ways in which you can learn and gain skills to achieve what you want in life.

If there was a profession for procrastinating, I would probably be one of the leaders in my field! Are there certain times a week where you just can’t be bothered to do anything? I know for myself at least, I binge on time that I haven’t got to sit and think about once or twice a week… Fortunately I have the luxury as a part time student at the moment, but come February I will be considered full time which is a scary thought considering I haven’t studied seriously for about two years. (Excluding independent research)

Although I do a lot of sitting and thinking, I am active in a neurological sense. What I tend to do is over think a task that is laid out in front of me. I avoid the obvious, probably most important aspect of what I’m supposed to be doing and think about ways in which I could do it in a more elaborate fashion. I do believe that divergent thinking is good and very useful when philosophizing and being creative, but when it comes to focus I find it incredibly difficult to zone into that one simple task…

Another factor that induce procrastination and laziness with me is the Internet… There is so much going on around the world and the Internet just brings it all into one convenient, sometimes mind numbing place. It creates a work shy ADHD frenzy in me, where I want to connect, learn, chat to people and basically do anything else other than what I’m supposed to be doing.

When I want to be, I can be extremely focused and driven, though it takes some work and self discipline to reach that point. If you are reading this post and nodding your head to everything I have written so far, you probably have a similar problem, so I thought I would share the ways I find that help me beat the laziness!

Routine…

Sometimes all it takes is a simple routine, a plan laid out for you to follow so you don’t have to think about organizing yourself. Just follow your predetermined directions and get on with it… No questions asked (You already know the answers).

Use a series of alarms and calendars both online and offline to achieve your goals! Google calendars is a great way for students to organize a timetable for school, college or university.

Remove the distractions…

You know what I’m talking about, the social networks that keep you glued to the screen watching hundreds of people narcissistically ramble about how boring their lives are or how much they love a certain thing…

Log out after every session… This way you will be more inclined to carry on with your goal.

For a more longterm approach deactivate or even delete an account if you are that addicted… 😮

Television, one of the most mind numbing contraptions ever invented… You may have thousands of channels to watch but does that mean you should watch them or even have them? No! Turn it off and think ahead of your goal! (The same applies for video games… Is that false sense of achievement really going to match the real satisfaction of achieving something worth while?)

Of course everyone is different, but these are simple and effective ways I use to beat procrastinating! However obvious, sometimes you just have to read/see it to understand what you have to do!

There are thousands of blogs, articles and other forms of media claiming they have the answer to becoming successful at marketing and promotion with social media, but how many have worked for you? How many times have you been offered this insightful information only to find it leaving you in the dark and confused at why it hasn’t worked…

Now there are a plethora of reasons why you’d want to build an audience for your website or product, but for me, the reason was to spread awareness about causes. Campaigns and events that I felt needed to be shared with the world, across a broad spectrum of subject matters. A worthy way to use a target audience and like minded people instead of trying to sell them something that would never work.

Well instead of ramble on for pages, rewording the same sentence for about three paragraphs to sound professional, here are the factors that helped me gain a large following:

Social Networking

Researching my target audience

Find out what drives your potential audience and how they feel about certain topics.

What words or phrases are going to get them excited and willing to read a post?

Is there an incentive?

A lot of the time people don’t read posts from websites, but often share because it is relevant to their interests.

What times are they most active? Are they systematically online at certain points during the day, or do they appear to have random activity?

Building my audience
This is the most laborious task and one that requires discipline. But I assure you the outcome is worth it.
In order to attain a large following you must sacrifice your egoratio. (How many followers/contacts to the amount you are being followed by) This is something that a few people I know have displayed whilst social networking… “People will come to me because I am interesting and insightful…” Wrong. The worst thing you can do is to keep sharing, expecting to get attention. What you need to do is follow or request as many contacts as possible, learning their interests and using websites that specifically track interests such as wefollow for twitter.

Twitter Case Study

Twitter for me has been the most successful way to build a following and the people on it are great, weird and wacky! My method for building such a diverse audience on twitter is to use wefollow alongside JustUnfollow. The influential accounts on twitter are the ones with the most active users and these are the accounts who’s followers you want to be following. You can check how influential an account is using wefollow. The Non followers function on JustUnfollow is invaluable and you can use this to unfollow the people that don’t follow you back, which is essential at first, especially after you have reached a follow limit. Literally the only way is to keep repeating these steps until you get people that follow you, increasing your follow/unfollow ratio which you can find out at TFFR along with more information about it. With this method I gained 1,000 followers in a week which speaks for itself!

Essential functions for successful social networking

Using and Sharing in groups.

Attaching links to your profiles on your website(s).

Using tags or hashtags for posts/tweets.

Tagging friends/groups

Attaching links in e-mails to your profiles of your favorite social networks.

All these methods are transferable to other social networks as they all share similar frameworks and principles.

If you have anything else to add let me know and if I agree I will revise the post and add accordingly, but for now… Happy social networking!

Ryan Lloyd is 22 years old and an undergraduate student at The Open University, studying towards a BSc (Honours) Environmental Science degree. He is an aspiring author in both fiction and non-fiction, typically writing about philosophy and science. He is currently writing his first novel called Ecollapse, a story set ... Continue reading →